Examination of evidence starts at Danske trial

Examination of evidence starts at Danske trial. Customer manager Marko Teder in a beige blouse and customer manager Mihhail Murnikov on the right next to him. Photo: Sander Ilvest

The court started the examination of written evidence at the second hearing of the Danske Bank money laundering case, the Estonian daily Postimees writes.

One major set of evidence that was examined at the hearing concerned the documents setting out Danske's internal procedures, rules and structure. The main dispute that arose in their case concerned the question of how reliable they can be considered, because in some cases there were white spaces instead of signatures. According to the defense, it cannot be ruled out that they were drawn up afterwards.

Public Prosecutor Maria Entsik said in response to these accusations that the statement of the defense only indicates that they have not read the documents, because the file contains, among other things, digital signatures and other things that confirm the authenticity of the documents.

Another major group of evidence contained the written responses and explanations of Danske employees to the inquiries of the Police and Border Guard Board and the prosecutor's office, where they presented Danske's structure, rules and procedures.

Among them were ex-employees of Danske, whom the defense unsuccessfully wanted to call to the witness stand. The defense's main criticism of this evidence is that there is no such form of evidence as a «written explanation» and the prosecution took the path of easier resistance when, instead of hearing witnesses or having them testify in court, they considered written testimonies to be sufficient. On the one hand, the defense cannot therefore check their versions, on the other hand, there is a fundamental difference here: in court, a person gives evidence under oath, and if they lie, it is a criminal offense. In the case of written explanations, however, they are not threatened with such consequences.

As with the reliability of the forms, the defense counsel's criticism of the unreliability of the written explanations was repeated throughout the hearing.

«If the defense's proposal is as if the prosecutor's office, as an investigative body, wants to gather evidence in the pre-trial proceedings regarding the bank's operating procedures, then it is completely unreasonable to put the prosecutor's office in such a position that they should randomly interrogate an indefinite number of bank employees for what this or that bank employee knew about structural changes, document directives that occurred at one point or another,» Entsik said.

According to her, with such an approach, they would get an extremely biased and strange picture of what happened at Danske.

The court hearing, which was supposed to last until 4 p.m., was terminated by agreement of the parties an hour and a half earlier than planned, because the pace of evidence processing was faster than expected. Evidence handling will continue on Thursday.